Neillsville Schools Graduation Set for Friday Night
Saturday, July 25th, 2020 -- 8:53 AM
Neillsville Schools District Administrator John Gaier talked with News Director Riley Hebert about the district's graduation ceremony plans yesterday. the ceremony is scheduled to take place Friday, July 31st at 7 pm.Here is Gaier's comment about the event.
Riley: “At Monday’s board meeting, it was decided 4 people could attend for each graduating senior at their ceremony on July 31st. Could you explain how next Friday’s ceremony is going to work?
Mr. Gaier: “Number one, it’s going to be outdoors on the football field, which will be the first time. I believe this will be the start of my 36th year here and we’ve never had an outside graduation in all the years that I’ve been here, so this will be new for all of us. So, we’re all hoping the weather cooperates, knowing that August 1st would be the rain date then. The afternoon of August 1st if we needed it.”
“What we will do is have the graduates gather in the elementary playground area to get ready. They will come in through the gate on the east side of the building. Each person coming to attend to watch will need to present a ticket to us. The reason that we had to do that, obviously, was to control the numbers, so that we could make sure that social distancing could be met. We are going to strongly recommend for people to wear masks, if they will, and then we are going to have marked spaces on the bleachers for the parents to sit. The students will be down on the field. We will have a temporary stage built down on the track, so as kids come across, they will be able to get their diploma and be recognized for getting that.”
“We still will have speeches by the high school principal and two of our students, so that will go on. We will not have live music, but there will be some canned music that we will be using for the ceremony, but we want to make sure that our kids get recognized for their achievement because this class of 2020 has had to sacrifice a lot and they’re just a wonderful group of kids that deserve to be recognized. We apologize for having to limit the number of people that can attend. But, it’s important to know, I think, that it will be live streamed on our website. And it will be recorded and left on our website, so anybody that wants to view that graduation ceremony can certainly do that.”
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